


It Was Always Gonna Be Us Three

by Curlscat



Category: The Sisters Grimm - Michael Buckley
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-22
Updated: 2020-01-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:29:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22364908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Curlscat/pseuds/Curlscat
Summary: Met in Prison Au: Sabrina winds up in juvie. While there, she meets a grubby, annoying boy, who's determined to be her friend. Against her better judgement, she winds up liking him.
Relationships: Puck Goodfellow/Sabrina Grimm, pre-slash - Relationship
Comments: 2
Kudos: 64





	It Was Always Gonna Be Us Three

**Author's Note:**

> originally a tumblr prompt (I forget who asked for it but if it was you lmk and I'll credit you). I've expanded it a little, though!

Sabrina supposes it was inevitable that she’d end up in juvie. Even if Smirt didn’t hate her, she and Daphne had to find a way to eat when they weren’t in foster homes. And they weren’t always legal. Thirteen-year-olds can’t get jobs.

She’s here for Daphne, she reminds herself.

And, hey, she might be in prison, but at least it’s cleaner than the orphanage. So what if this is the first time she and Daphne have been apart in nearly four years? So what if Daphne’s gonna have to take care of herself? Sabrina’s free of Smirt and of all responsibility for the first time since she was ten years old. 

And she’s only here for six months. She’ll make the best of it.

***

Sabrina fits well into the environment of Horizon Juvenile Center. She’s a little younger than most of the kids here, but she’s as tough as all of them, and as brave. She proves it early on, and nobody in the girl’s ward bothers her. She doesn’t have friends, exactly, but she doesn’t have enemies, and that’s all well and good.

That is, until the center takes a field trip to the Liberty Science center, and Sabrina meets the boys.

Most of the boys are fine. They’re bigger than Sabrina, shrimpy little blonde that she is, but they have the same worn-down look that most of the girls do: too tired to care unless someone tries to hurt them.

One boy, though, is not like that. He looks like he’s a year or two younger than Sabrina, though he’s taller than she is (of course he is; everyone’s taller than Sabrina). The kid is filthy despite the daily showers that are Horizon policy, and he’s managed to sneak a ratty green hoodie past the wardens. His ratty hair is a long mess of curls, and it looks like it would be even more implausibly blonde than Sabrina’s if he were to wash the dirt out.

And he won’t leave her alone.

It starts with a whoopie cushion under her seat. Nobody even glances at her, because the bus is too noisy for it to have stood out, but Sabrina knows, and she looks around to see that boy laughing hysterically across the aisle. She glares at him and throws the rubber sack at his face. He grins wider.

From there it keeps going, getting worse and worse as the day goes on. And it doesn’t stop with the end of the field trip. Somehow the kid finds his way into the girl’s ward and leaves her presents like frogs in her bed.Sabrina is both angry at these constant interruptions to her life and baffled at the boy (his name is Robin, she learns) and his ability to get around the security at Horizons. She puts up with them as well as possible, because if she gets in trouble she’ll be stuck here for longer. Or worse, they won’t let Daphne visit.

They do, though, sort of, make things interesting.

***

“How is it in there?” Daphne asks, the day she’s finally allowed to come visit.

Sabrina shrugs and picks at the fuzz collecting itself on the couch she’s sitting on. The visiting room in the detention center is all unpainted cinder block walls and furniture that looks like it was used when they bought it twenty years ago. There’s a spring poking the back of her leg. All this is still easier to focus on than Daphne.

Daphne, who is taller than she was the last time Sabrina saw her. Daphne, whose braids have been shorn off, who has a black eye, who is still bubbly and happy to see her. Daphne, taller, yes, but still so small, still soft and round and young and  _ alone _ , like Sabrina abandoned her, even if otherwise Daphne would be in here instead. Daphne who she hasn’t seen in months.

“It’s… fine,” Sabrina says at last. “Everyone leaves me alone, mostly. How about you?”

Sabrina’s not looking at her sister, but she hears a  _ shff _ of noise from the other side of the couch, so Daphne probably shrugged, too. “I mean I got in a fight the other day. A boy tried to take my cereal.”

A fight. Daphne got in a fight. Daphne had to stand up for herself, Daphne had to fight, Daphne didn’t have Sabrina there to protect her, Daphne— 

“Oh,” Sabrina says.

“Yeah,” Daphne says back.

They’re silent for a long time.

“I’m okay, mostly,” Daphne says after a minute. “I miss you, but I’m being good. Staying out of trouble.”

Except for the fight, Sabrina doesn’t say. Because what can she do? She can’t be there to protect her sister, can’t get mad at her sister for defending herself, can’t can’t  _ can’t _ do anything. So she stays quiet.

“But are things really okay in here?” Daphne asks. “I mean, are you— you seem… quiet.”

Sabrina starts to tell her sister that there’s nothing, nobody here, that she’s just existing, then says, “Well, there’s— don’t get any ideas, okay? But there’s this boy.”

“Ooh,” Daphne says, immediately getting exactly the kind of ideas that Sabrina told her not to. “A  _ boy _ ? Is he cute?”

“I don’t know,” Sabrina says. “He’s  _ filthy _ . Maybe he’s cute under all the dirt, but you really can’t tell.”

“What’s he like?” Daphne asks.

So Sabrina tells her. She doesn’t say  _ he’s making things bearable in here _ or  _ he’s all I’ve got except you, and I don’t know how he got this important _ , but she does tell her sister about the weird things he does and says. And by the end of it, she’s looking at her sister, and Daphne is laughing, laughing, and maybe, soon, things will be okay again.

And for now, that’s enough. It has to be.

***   
The night she finds her roommate gone and Robin occupying Tara’s bed, it’s too much. All her nice thoughts about him from earlier, about how he makes her life inside this place bearable, are gone.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she demands.

He grins at her. It’s cocky and makes her want to punch him, but there are cameras. And the more trouble she gets in, the longer they’ll keep her here. The longer Daphne will be alone and vulnerable.

"Aren’t you happy to see me?” he asks.

Sabrina rolls her eyes. “No. Plus we’ll get in trouble. Guys aren’t allowed in here.”

“Oh, come on, we’re stuck here for ages anyway. How much worse can they make it for us?”

“They can keep us here longer,” Sabrina points out. This is her worst fear: she’ll be stuck here until she’s eighteen and Daphne will grow up alone and turn into her.

Robin snorts. “Come on. Free food, free clothes, free entertainment. What’s not to like?”

“I hate being ordered around,” Sabrina says, which is true, even if it’s not the real reason she wants out.

“So don’t listen to them.” He leans back on her roommate’s bed, completely nonchalant. “I don’t.”

Sabrina doesn’t think this is worth a response. She climbs into her bed, wishing for a chance to change into her pajamas, and tries to ignore the fact that Robin is right there and somehow managing not to get caught.

There’s silence for a few minutes. Sabrina starts to drift off to sleep.

“Aren’t you curious about how I got in here?”

So much for sleep.

“Are you going to tell me anyway?”

“Yup.” 

“Then fine.”

“I’m magic.”

Sabrina rolls her eyes in the darkness. “Riiiight.”

“Oh, you don’t believe me?” He stands, glaring at her, and suddenly, in the darkness, there are extra shadows behind him. Big ones.

Sabrina blinks. Maybe she fell asleep after all. She rubs her eyes. Nope. They’re still there. She gets up, touches the things—wings. Robin, pain-in-her-skinny-rear-end Robin whatshisface, has wings sticking out of his back.   
  
That’s it, she’s gone crazy.

***   
It takes a long time for Robin to convince her not to check herself into the psych ward, and by then she’s pretty dang ticked at him. It turns out he’s been turning himself into a bug and spying on her.

“So why tell me?” she asks eventually. That’s a little more productive than “I will kill you in your sleep,” which is what she wants to say.

He shrugs. “You’re different. More alive than everyone else in here. I thought maybe we could have fun together.”

Sabrina shakes her head. “As soon as my time’s up in a couple months, I’m out of here, and you’ll never see me again.”

He looks a little sad about this, and she almost feels guilty. Then she remembers how annoying he is. Still, she has a lot of trouble falling asleep after he clears out of her room.

***

He doesn’t give up, though. He starts appearing at her lunch table and talking to her like they’re friends, telling her his plans and making jokes. Sometimes she even laughs at them. Eventually, she tells him about Daphne, almost in spite of herself, as if it’s any of his business. He doesn’t laugh at her, or use it against her.

She finds herself looking forward to seeing him, and the first day he doesn’t show up, she has to remind herself that she’s not here to make friends. She’s here to serve her time and get back to her sister. Friends are just weak spots. And she doesn’t want to get attached to anyone she’s just going to leave. It’s not worth it.

Still, she smiles back at him when he reappears the next day, jabbering about how he wound up in solitary confinement.

He’s still annoying, and she gets in trouble for him turning her hair green, among other things, but as the weeks pass, she finds she doesn’t mind it so much. He’s… well, he’s more fun than anything in her life has been since she was ten years old. And he’s getting her to lighten up a bit, which not even Daphne managed to do.

The end of her sentence comes up faster than she expected, and she realizes something: she’s going to miss him.

This is horrible. Caring about people just gives them an opportunity to hurt you, she knows that, and he’s just going to disappear from her life like everyone other than Daphne has ever done. She can’t… she can’t want to see more of him. It messes up all her plans. She had it set: play it cool for a few weeks, maybe a couple months, be good, and then plan a way out for good. She and Daphne would run out of the city. Maybe they’d go upstate. There were farms up there. They could get food. Or they could go south, where it would be warm.

But this… this would ruin everything. She wanted to stay where she could visit him.

She’d just have to ignore it. She’d lost people before, and she’d gotten over it. Daphne was more important than her friend.

So she said goodbye to him and followed Ms. Smirt to the taxi that would take her back to the orphanage. Back to Daphne. She tried to remind herself that this was what she’d wanted. Daphne was the most important thing.

It still hurt.

***

When she finally sees her sister, Daphne’s back is to her. She’s talking to a tall blonde boy in a green sweatshirt.

“Daphne!” she calls, grinning. This helps a lot. She’s missed her sister.

Daphne turns, and grins even wider. She runs up to her sister and hugs her tightly, babbling about making a new friend today.

The boy Daphne was talking to has come up close to them while Sabrina’s been trying to listen to her sister. When the girls finally release each other, Sabrina looks up to assess this boy, because Daphne has been known to befriend very dangerous people in the past, and Sabrina has to check on her friends, and then—

She freezes.

It’s Robin.

“How—?” she asks, eyes wide, hands trembling. “You—”

He grins at her. “I decided you were too much fun to annoy to let you escape.”

“He says we’re gonna run away together,” Daphne tells Sabrina. “Is it true?”

Sabrina smiles at her little sister and says, “Oh, it’s the truest thing he’s ever said.”


End file.
